The whole sixth form went into mourning. Imagine 200 weeping teenagers wearing black, moping even more than usual, and talking about a musician as though he'd just stepped off a rock and ascended into heaven.

The whole thing made me furious; I loved the man's music as much as the next angst-ridden adolescent and he had the good sense to loathe Axl Rose, but he was also a deeply troubled heroin addict who had a daughter under two whose life was now going to be a lot harder.

When one friend tearfully praised him for being brave to kill himself I lost my rag and yelled something along the lines of: "He's a f***ed up junkie who isn't brave enough to get out of bed tomorrow and has just royally screwed up his own daughter! Praise it? F*** THAT ."

That stopped the sniffling, out of surprise if nothing else.

But then, I and my friends were all 17. The people who sang the music we listened to on a loop were more influential than our parents, and the things our peers thought meant life and death to us.

A year or so later I started work as a journalist, and the first suicide I covered was that of one of my friend's fathers. He gassed himself in his car. His wife had no idea why, but he was a gentle soul and it was assumed he had thought everyone else would be better off without him.

My fingers have tapped out the facts on a lot of suicides since then, and I know more than I did when I was 17. I know depression can hit anyone, that even your loved ones can't always see it, and taking your own life happens when you just can't see any alternative.

I also know that anger is one of the first stages of grief, so perhaps that's why I was so livid at Kurt Cobain. How dare he do that to his daughter, to me, to the sixth form?

On April 8, it will be 20 years to the day that the news broke Cobain had blown his brains out in a room above the garage in his Seattle home. He'd lain there for three days, the gun on his chest and a suicide note left on top of some soil in the greenhouse.

Still not brave, but so twisted up on himself he could see no way out. I've more sympathy for him these days, but that residual adolescent anger is directed instead at the drugs which made his troubles inestimably worse and those who didn't help him; he'd left rehab just days before he died, and a few weeks earlier police were called to reports he'd locked himself in a room with a gun.

They are conducting a cold case review of Cobain's death, have announced there are some undeveloped pictures of the scene, and say they'll release them and answer questions about it on the anniversary.

Not because there's any fresh evidence. Not because anyone else has been implicated. And not because the family or the Press have urged them to.

Wait, what? An anniversary which would get little more than 'oh hey, do you remember?' is reason enough to exhume the mouldering corpse of a closed suicide case merely because he was famous?

Well, let's not stop there, lads. Surely we ought to dig up Sylvia Plath while we're at it and the oven she stuck her head in, then perhaps let's gawp at the rocks Virginia Woolf put in her coat pocket before she killed herself, or regard Tony Hancock's vodka bottle?

Perhaps CrimeWatch should re-enact the crucifixion while we're at it, and Dan Snow could go to Berlin and get someone to swallow cyanide while we all watch.

But only the worst kind of cynic would suggest a police force would try to distract attention from its own flaws by shining a spotlight on a celebrity death, so I won't.

The fact they've found four undeveloped rolls of film in the evidence box and have released several photos two weeks early, while telling everyone the rest will be published on the anniversary, is merely them being helpful.

And promising a full press conference about an historic tragedy when there is little new to say to a bunch of journalists who otherwise wouldn't have written anything much about Seattle Police Department is simply a case of the authorities being 'transparent'.

As for the obvious questions about why those pictures weren't examined by the coroner 20 years ago, and whether they ran this curious public relations exercise past Cobain's family to see if they were OK with it first - well, to ask them would be to imply Seattle Police Department were a bunch of amoral publicity whores with all the empathy and humanity of Katie Hopkins, and that's just mean.

No, it's quite clear to me that Seattle Police Department sincerely believe the 20th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's senseless suicide is the perfect opportunity to look at his blood-spattered personal effects because they're so twisted up on themselves they can't see the obvious wrongness of it.